The cult of greed and power: Scientology and Dianetics

Scientology claims to be "the world's largest
mental health organization". What it really is however, is the world's
largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of
dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy. Scientology is
evil; its techniques evil; its practice a serious threat to the community,
medically, morally and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and
often mentally ill.

Introduction

Scientology is a form of pseudo-science invented by the mediocre late science-fiction
writer Lafayette Ron Hubbard (here is his picture).
Scientology claims to make people more able to communicate; but after taking
their courses, you'll find out that it will only help you to communicate
inside
Scientology. It claims to be compatible with other religions; but as you
progress, you will have to accept that Elron Hubbard
denies
JC's existance (also here
with more context). It first came up as Dianetics,
but Ron got in trouble soon, for teaching medicine without a license. After
(temporarly) losing the rights for Dianetics to one of his investors, he
founded Scientology, and declared it a religion for financial and
legal reasons. Religions don't pay taxes, and they don't have to prove
anything. As early as 1968, a magazine called Scientology a
menace to mental health. Here a description of
Scientology by ex-member Martin Hunt. Scientology is very
expensive; a father who didn't want to pay for the "services" of his
son received a threatening letter written by Reverend
Andrew
Bagley, a Scientology official. Recovery takes
long and is very difficult. The title of this paragraph comes from
the excellent and award-winning article in TIME
magazine called
The
thriving cult of greed and power, written by Richard
Behar.

Will the following become true?

"First the Scientologists went after their ex-members,
but I ignored it, because I had never been a Scientologist. Then they went
after the "squirrels" [Scientologists who practice outside of Scientology],
but I ignored it, because I wasn't a squirrel. Then they went after the
psychiatrists but I didn't care since I never needed a psychiatrist. Then
they went after the journalists but I didn't speak up because I wasn't
a journalist. Then the Scientologists went after the Christians but I didn't
speak up because I was an atheist. Then they went after me, and no one
was left to help me."

(from me, inspired by the Martin Niemöller quote)

Yes, Scientology would like this to become true. L. Ron Hubbard
suggested in different books to put people who disagree with in quarantine
(20% of the population), or simply to dispose
of them quietly and without sorrow (2.5% of the population)

Learn about Scientology in the USENET

The meeting place of Scientology critics and a few Scientologists is the
USENET newsgroup alt.religion.scientology.
See the list of frequently
unanswered questions to find out what questions Scientologists evade
most. If you have problems with your news provider, you can still read
through Google Groups
(allows searching the whole usenet for people and topics!).

Scientology has in the past arranged the cancellation of usenet articles
it didn't like. But not every article that disappears has been cancelled
by Scientology. So before complaining, read the Disappearing
Articles FAQ.

Margery Wakefield's The
Road to Xenu: a fictionalized account of her time in Scientology,
based on both her own experiences and those of people she knew or heard
about. Amazing because it describes the day-to-day life in the cult, and
although she was out at the time she wrote it, it reads like a diary. If
you want to know how a Scientologist life looks like, then read this book

Russell Miller's The
Bare-Faced Messiah: Scientology unsuccessfully tried to stop the
book in the UK, but was partly successful in the US. Because of that, the
US Copyright law was later changed.

Cyril Vosper's The
Mind Benders: he alleges that a copy of his manuscript disappeared
from his lodgings, and, while on holiday in Spain, he was questioned by
the police when they opened a parcel addressed to the place in which he
was staying, containing obscene caricatures of General Franco.

Stewart Lamont's Religion
Inc.: The Church of Scientology (also here:
this book has a special flavour because Scientology tried to "support"
the author, who had (and used) a unique opportunity to see through some
of their propaganda by comparing it with the actual facts.

Spiritual Counterfeits Project: SCP
is a resource to provide a biblical perspective on new religions
and spiritual trends. Sadly they endorse Marty Rimm (bogus "Cyberporn"
study) and creationism.

Prof. Dr. David Lane's neural
surfer is about Radhasoami, Sant Mat, Shabd Yoga, Eckanckar, the Development
of New Religious Movements in North America and much more. It contains
also several books he wrote.

Xenu

Xenu is a sort of devil for customers of the Scientology cult. Since the
world of Scientology is quite similar to George Orwell's 1984, you
can compare L. Ron Hubbard to the Big Brother, and Xenu to Emmanuel Goldstein.
Xenu has web pages in Germany and in Norway.

According to the anonymously posted price list,
after a cultie has paid about $159,160 (or worked years for nearly no money
at all), and has been in good standing with the management, he is eligible
to read the OT
3 (operating thetan three) materials. He gets a xerox of handwritten
notes by the cult's founder explaining that all our troubles come from
an evil guy from outer space named Xenu. Here is an article
from the Los Angeles Times about what the cult did when the materials were
available in open court records. Hey kids! Listen to the Xenu
after-school special to know more about this guy! (You need to
have RealVideo installed)

Jerry Ladd researched about Xenu and came up with a different explanation.
According to him, Xenu was good, but an evil guy with the name "Phatmanotoo"
framed him to cover up his failure in nuclear science class. He created
the Knights of Xenu, a loose community of good people.
There's no sign-up, no contract; just affix KoX to your signature and you're
in.

Mozilla

Mozilla ist the little green monster from the Netscape
Corporation. For some time, he vanished from their home pages, so I built
the Mozilla Museum. Visit and enjoy!

"Bob"

J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the mighty pipe-smoking salesman, is discussed in the
newsgroup alt.slack, which is for members
of the Church of the Subgenius,
and he preaches Slack ! Read all about the weirdest cult ever.

Also read the success stories of some SubGenius
parishioners, who have improved their life thanks to DobbsThink [tm].

Does "Tilman Hausherr" mean anything?

It does. "Tilman" has anglo-saxon origins and means "a suitable man, a
warrior". I am rather a desk warrior. Judge yourself if this is true. "Tilman"
is often misspelled, because other guys are named Tilmann, Tillman or Tillmann.
It is sometimes also used as a last name. My first name was given to me after they
thought about
Tilman Riemenschneider,
a german sculptor.

"Hausherr" is a German word and means "The master of the house".
The word is also used to mean the "host".
It is pronounced like the english words "House hair".

What's in a name, and why does a name tell a lot about your parents? Read chapter 6 of Freakonomics. And don't name your child Kevin.

Who pays Tilman?

From time to time, Scientologists allege that critics are paid by evil
people to destroy other people's religions. First, unlike many cults, Scientology
is not a religion, but a business; second, critics not only do
it for free, but even pay for it: with less free time to watch TV or read a book.

The truth is that I am an ordinary guy who has an ordinary job as a
software developer in a company that offers software services to medium
and large-sized clients. We develop and maintain optical archives, as well
as client & server software to manage them. We also arrange bulk scanning
and indexing and provide tailored solutions for our clients:

Scanning of paper from DIN A4 - A0

Microfiche scanning

Indexing with or without control algorithms

Processing of incoming paper mail, FAX mail and e-mail and forwarding on CD or over the network

Semi-automatic indexing through OCR / ICR

I did a lot of server-related development on UNIX in the 90ies, and became somewhat disillusioned due to the poor reliability of this OS (this was before LINUX became widely popular; bugs sometimes took years to be fixed!),
and concentrated on Windows client applications with Microsoft Visual C++ and their really cool and powerful foundation classes (MFC). I make a better living from it than these
two.

Since 2005, I've also done some work with Java, JSTL and Tomcat. I have used MySQL and Oracle databases, including PL/SQL.

Around 2011, I started using Apache PDFBox. Unlike earlier experiences with open source communities, questions were not answered with insults, so I kept using it and even wrote improvements that ended up in the official code, like this one (about Gouraud shading, a 3D technique invented in the 70ies but still relevant!). My experience with Apache projects is that they seemed to have a friendly attitude. I learned a lot in the PDFBox project, despite being neither a graphics developer nor a math expert (although I best in school in math, but forgot all over the years). In 2014, I was invited to become a committer (i.e. have write access on the source code). In 2014 and 2015, I mentored students as part of the Google Summer of Code program.

I've also done some minor work for MediathekView and one bugfix for TVBrowser (both great projects!).

My PGP key

If
you feel you must send me a PGP-encoded message because you feel under
surveillance, go ahead. But do it only if it is really important and
confidential. A message like "Hi, Tilman, what's your opinion about this
topic" isn't!